online advertising

Imagine you are a simple businessman, who has his own website and you want to bring more traffic on your site. As you are familiar with Microsoft software for decades now, naturally you'll want to check out their online advertising system.

Here are some basic guidelines to make the experience less painful:

First pitfall - Don't even consider using Safari or any other browser except IE and Mozilla, adCenter website does not support other browsers. Their help center states that also Mac and Virtual machines are not supported.

Before he found out that all Mac browsers are banned, Alec, our creative director, spent several hours trying to get Microsoft adCenter to work with all of the browsers under Mac OS, including spoofing the user-agent. Futile, he assures me. You can't even view the System requirements page!

The good news: Tech stocks are the blue chips of today’s economy. The companies are bigger and better run than ever before.

Still not convinced this sector has matured? Today, there are eight U.S. tech companies with market caps greater than $100 billion. Only three U.S. financial institutions are worth that much. Three. Last week, technology surpassed financials as the biggest component of the S&P 500.

Over the last month, the internet has been awash with stories of the fabled New York Times slow demise, as indicated by huge losses and impending layoffs. As the new Wall Street Journal hires, the New York Times fires.

The decline in New York Times revenue and readership surprised me somewhat, but I accepted the decline at face value. Given the New York Times atrocious editorial standards throughout the Bush regime, including aiming and abetting war crimes (Judith Miller), the loss in circulation seemed like just desserts.

But today, Comcast's list of the top 50 websites for March came across my desk. Based on unique visitors, guess who's at number 12 with 47 million unique visitors for the month? For refernce, that's just behind Wikipedia, Amazon and ahead of Facebook, CNET, Adobe, CBS and Craigslist: The New York Times Digital.

Which set me to thinking what kind of second rate media (advertising sales) strategy would it take to lose money with the number 12 website.

What AdSense spam is are those sites which you arrive on via either organic search or PPC results (usually the former) and you find nothing but RSS feeds or chopped up articles on a very basic template. The sites rarely have any contact information. To be blunt, they are of no value at all except to their owner who brings in traffic at one price and sells it off at another price.